The Story

Letitia Wright plays Yvonne, an ambitious Black journalist in this play about journalism and journalistic integrity.  It’s set in 1990’s America, and a white man lost in a car in a rundown area of town is attacked and murdered, his wife describing the murderer as a Black man.  So it sets itself up as a bit of a whodunnit, with the newsroom well placed to investigate.  Yvonne is keen to cover the story but has just started her job in the Black newsroom and she is put on local Black stories rather than the bigger one she is interested in. Her boss is Pat (played by Lorraine Toussaint - loved her in Orange is the New Black) a war weary veteran of the civil rights movement with Neil (Ashley Thomas), as her enthusiastic sidekick who is convinced the wife is responsible for the murder.  The last of the main quartet of the cast is Wilf Scolding as Jeff, Yvonne's rich boyfriend, who also happens to own the paper.

Despite setting us up with a mystery, this is really about who has the right to tell a story and how there are as many versions of the story as there are people telling it.  This is set in the context of race, and class and the civil rights movement, all under the cloud of misogyny and patriarchal structures.  Yvonne and Pat take different approaches, with Yvonne -ambitious, middle class,not wanting to be defined by her race, and looking to move on to the next bit of her career where race is irrelevant. By comparison  Pat sees everything through that lense, given her history with the Rights movement.  I like that neither is seen as right, or is particularly likeable, but we get the chance to see some (although not all) of the consequences of their different approaches.

There’s a lot of good and interesting stuff packed in here but sometimes there is so much I found it impossible to keep up.   I found the parallel scenes conceptually clever but having people talking at the same time but without being fully synchronised has the practical challenge that it can be hard to follow. In addition, there is generally so much being squeezed in at a frenetic pace and so much to look at on stage.  There wasn't a nice tidy ending with plot threads tied up and where we all understood what happened and that is fine, and I understand why that works for the aims of this production, but sometimes it just didn't hit right. For example, I found the shocking drop by Pat of her terrible experience with the Civil Rights movement a bit out of nowhere, despite its relevance, and that reduced its impact for me a bit and didn't actually go anywhere afterwards.  I understand a fair bit has been cut from the play though to reduce runtime so I wonder if that might be part of the problem?  

Overall, what I took from this is that the truth gets lost in the rush to shape the story to meet an agenda and everybody in this play has a different agenda; it actually delivered that message very well.  There are the bones of a really good play here, sort of lost for me under the complexity and sheer amount of content before it all quite literally goes up in flames.

All of the performances were great, particularly Letitia Wright and Lorraine Toussaint, and and there was lots to think about, particularly as there were lots of unresolved threads to pull on.  Clive Dyer, who was responsible for the fantastic Death of England series, is director for this production, and I can see his influence here in a good way.  Maybe the fact that we are left with questions rather than answers is the point.

Good ideas, good performances, and I can't believe I am saying this, but maybe it needed a bit more time to let the themes fully play out.